Students should read the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and then discuss the impact the Soviet gulag had on the human spirit and how one man survived the experience of being arrested and sent to a Soviet concentration camp. Be specific.
Also, please give the story some historical context. The gulag is a part of the Soviet’s totalitarian past. Under Stalin’s dictatorship, the people had no rights per say nor did they have any legal protection against government abuse of power. Many ordinary citizens were arrested and imprisoned for no reason at all and had no recourse. Not only did people suffer from brutal and in many ways dehumanizing atrocities in the camps, hundreds of thousands of people also lost their lives from either being worked to death and or starved.
No other sources other than the book by Solzhenitsyn, the textbook, Patterns, and the handout, Gulag: Soviet Prison Camps and their Legacy by David Hosford, Pamela Kachurin, and Thomas Lamont should be used for this assignment.